


the world that you love to behold

by campholmes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: EWE and still a wartime fic, M/M, a love letter to grimmauld place
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:41:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22219465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campholmes/pseuds/campholmes
Summary: “I love you. I’m done wasting time,” he says. Potter says it hot against Draco’s face. Draco is kissing him before he can take another breath. He tastes Potter’s blood.And Draco understands, then, why people fuck and fall in love in wartime.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	the world that you love to behold

**Author's Note:**

> this has taken me almost my whole life to write. title: walk in the park by beach house
> 
> more on its way!

On the one-thousand, nine hundred and seventeenth night of Draco’s stay in Grimmauld place, it is nearing Christmastime. There is a pervasive ache in his ribs from a stunner meant for Potter. He and Granger had spent the day lying on the couches in the library, reading Muggle romance novels. And now he sits quietly, watching Potter’s fingers flick a red flame, in the blue-dark of the big house. 

The kitchen is heavy, sticky with silence. The walls are black with shimmering blue pinstriped wallpaper, in the night. Potter uses his finger-flame to light his cigarette. Draco keeps watching. That hard pit in his stomach won’t go away. The night around them is winterfallen silence. The kind that is muffled further by the snow, dementor-snow, now. Heavy snow that is rare in London. Potter’s line of long black hair blocks half of his sharp face in waves, while the warm glow of the fireplace lights the other. Draco cups his hands around his teacup. His fingers are perpetually cold. The hot makes them sting. He does his best to contain a shiver.

He thinks that he might be coming down with something, but then again, it could always be an allergy to the oversized, bent Christmas trees that have been stuffed into every room. Gathering spaces, Granger and Minerva had agreed, needed cheer—Draco thinks it looks desperate, the baubles from the attic, silver mottled with age, remind him sharply of his childhood. Each tree is stuffed full with them. The walls are tall and close.

“You want one?” Potter asks. He’s taken to engaging Draco in conversation at every opportunity. Especially when Draco craves silence. His voice is deep and cracking around the smoke. There’s a bit of tinsel on his broad shoulder, likely from brushing against the hallway decorations on his way in from patrol. 

Muggle cigarettes have a sharper scent than the pipe Draco’s father used to smoke. It reminds him of Potter, now, the smell that he can hardly place now for how often it is in his nostrils. Draco doesn’t know why he waited for Potter to come home, in the dark kitchen. Except it is warm and close and dreary, and Draco is wearing a long green scarf knitted by Molly. Except that he hasn’t had a solid night’s sleep for maybe seven years, at least. Not since he really realized the gravity of the thing, you know.

“Alright,” Draco says. Potter hands him one, lights it with those same snapped fingers. 

In the morning, or later in the morning, Draco knows it is nearing four, Potter may laugh that giggle, the one that makes your own stomach seize with the sheer joy of it. Painfully contagious. Potter has discovered some kind of endless font of amusement in these troubled times. Maybe it has something to do with Fleur’s pregnant belly, or Molly’s dinners, everyone crammed tight at the long table. Draco feels it, too, sometimes. Just barely. When they are all together and he looks at someone just the right way. A big feeling, in his chest. Wide and growing. A fast feeling, a flash between his temples. That hot, determined recognition of love, or maybe just camaraderie, that brings his hands to twist together and his heart to race.

He doesn’t know if he can imagine an end to it. He thinks about it in bed, with Potter snoring loudly across the room. When he is unable to sleep, he wonders if he’ll be dead tomorrow, or if they’ll win it, or if Potter will keep staring at him on cold evenings when all of it stops.

But now, with Potter’s face in the firelight, it is silent but for their breathing. Draco’s eyes lift upwards to the ceiling. He can’t truly place where it is in the dark. Just pitch black, oblivion above their heads. The house swirling family magic in the spaces that they do not take up.

Draco has learned to love Grimmauld Place and its humdrum lonely feel. It matches Potter, he thinks, his dark presence that is flipped like a switch into pure delight. The largeness of him that he came into after the death of his godfather, almost as if Sirius had gone inside of him and taken up half of the space. The house has expanded to fit all of them, and sometimes when Potter is out Draco will whisper to the wall of their shared bedroom and stroke it, to feel his blood thrumming with something from before in his fingertips, like how it felt to put his head in his mother’s lap. Potter sits in the living room with dragonhide boots propped onto the antique coffee table, and the floorboards themselves groan in fond protest of him. Draco has learned the rush of magic in the walls and its ever-shifting meanings.

The house likes Potter. Draco was surprised to find it so at the beginning, when he had been taken off his post as teenage-spy. He had still been enthralled by his family history in the worst way, and had felt a twinge of betrayal, maybe, at Potter’s reckless treatment of the place. Stomping mud everywhere. Putting cigarettes out on the bathroom tiles while he showered. Spitting into the sink. But the house had siphoned up the dirt, had let the water run off the ash. And Draco had learned to do the same, too, somewhere between then and now.

The first time he and Potter had really spoken, after Draco had felt settled enough in the place to make his own tea without invitation from Severus, it had been in the garden, in the winter. No-one had bothered in decades, maybe, to tend to it the way wizards do, and the perennials had been sleeping in ways Draco had only seen in the woods around the Manor, never in the perpetually flowering gardens on the grounds. It had been silent as a result. It had felt wild and far away. Potter had brought him out for a cigarette. Sirius had been dead three years, by then.

Draco remembers their conversation like it happened moments ago, can still feel the burn of the frozen air shock his lungs. Potter had told him he was glad to work with him, and Draco had stared at the round muscle of his shoulder beneath his thick white t-shirt. It had been freezing, and Potter’s usually quite rosy brown skin had been greyed and goose-bumped.

Draco had suggested he put on a sweater, or a jacket. Potter had looked down at himself in genuine surprise.

He was always the kind of person to think of himself last. In a genuine-forgetting kind of way, truly unknowing of his own discomfort.

Right now, Potter finishes his cigarette, ashes it in the old Black heirloom bowl. When Draco had first seen Potter carrying the bowl around with him from room to room, he had cringed. He’s used to it, now. Potter being careless with objects hundreds of years old. He lights another.

The kitchen is one of Draco’s favorite rooms in the old house. He spends a decadent amount of time here, when not on patrol, working out in the cellar, or agonizing over theory in the library with Granger. He wakes before all other inhabitants of the house, even Minerva, who usually comes down for tea half an hour after him. It is a not-rare, but still precious morning quiet.

He loves the giant fireplace, heavy with old soot and carved with vague worn creatures, the big worn table and chairs, and the dark wood cabinets. The stack of old _Prophets_ on the chair in the corner grows by the day, and no-one really thinks to throw them out. Granger often leaves tomes on the counters, leaving Kreacher despairing whenever he and Potter start on dinner. 

And now, the sanctuary with Potter in the early morning hours. The radio is crackling on a Muggle station in the corner, so quietly Draco knows they will forget to turn it off when they finally creep up to bed.

“Was boring tonight,” Potter says. A thick cloud of smoke spills out of his mouth on the comment. Draco raises a brow in acknowledgement. “‘S getting old. Patrol. Especially ‘round Hogwarts. I mean really, with Sev up there, what’s the worst that could happen? Nothing I could prevent, that’s for sure. We’ve been thinking they’re creeping further east, now that their numbers are fewer.”

Draco hasn’t gotten used to Potter’s casual nickname usage where Severus is concerned, but he, as always, tucks it into the corner of his mind where he keeps the things he’d rather forget. He nods and takes the final drag of his first cigarette. He’d been speaking with Granger on the same hypothesis.

At this point, whoever’s left of the Death Eaters are the most deranged. The most deranged by _far_ , if Draco might speak freely. People he’s never even really heard of, only whispers by his Auntie Bella in the middle of the night into Riddle’s shining, creepy ear. Which is why they’re all still stuck in this bloody house, all together like some kind of Muggle summer camp. Draco is rather tired of Weasley’s elbow in his porridge.

“I’m rather sick of it too,” Potter says. Draco starts, then is reminded dearly of Potter’s absolute abysmal Legilimency skills. Draco’s exact thoughts must have been stark on his face. He fingers the old scar on his chin, where it runs down his neck and chest. Potter watches his fingers. His eyes are dark, but Draco knows what he is thinking.

“I should be able to touch my own skin without you sending yourself into hysterics, Potter. And self-flagellating hysterics, at that. Come on,” Draco coughs. Potter raises his head, tucks his hair behind his ear, then laughs a single sharp note. Draco rolls his eyes.

“‘M not self- self what? Self-flagellating… Christ, Draco.” 

“You are, don’t bother arguing again. I don’t want you like this. We’re a good team,” Draco can physically feel himself doing the turning-up-his-nose thing. Potter laughs a little, hushed in the close room. The house makes a sigh, so alive with Christmas and despair.

“Alright. I’ll forget about the scars.” Draco rolls his eyes.

“Can I get that in writing?” Potter bites his bottom lip sheepishly.

Draco can feel a change in the air, something about the way Potter’s eyes flash. He knows it’s coming. He doesn’t want to stop it, so he doesn’t. He just waits.

-

It happens sometime after then and before Christmas day. 

A failed mission, something at the Ministry with Umbridge and Potter is storming through the hall to a harried Draco, who waits for him despite all his rationale begging him to remain upstairs, to not be in the way when the next best course of action is always to debrief. His hands cup Draco’s cheeks and Draco’s mouth has already fallen open, his eyes bore into Draco’s. His nose is bleeding all down his neck.

“I love you. I’m done wasting time,” he says. Potter says it hot against Draco’s face. Draco is kissing him before he can take another breath. He tastes Potter’s blood.

And Draco understands, then, why people fuck and fall in love in wartime. He knows why, now, babies are born and weddings are left and right. He wants to kiss Harry every waking moment. Suddenly he can see himself dying a million different ways, because Harry fucks into him like it’s going to be the last time every time, and every time Draco comes as if he will never come again. It is terrifying and it is all Draco has ever wanted. His gut unwinds despite the risk factor rising. The more he has to lose the better he feels about his own mortality. The house settles around them.

He drags Harry to the big bathroom on the third floor, the one they share with Weasley and Granger and Ginny and Luna and Neville, all the _kids_ , they still call them, on one floor like it’s a perverted, deathtrap version of Hogwarts, priming them for battle and the constant fear of losing each other. Now made all the more close since they are old enough to know. He sits him on the counter, and the stream of water Draco uses to wet a washcloth to clean him echoes when he turns the faucet off, in the big cold room.

Harry looks down at him from his perch with dark eyes, almost black in the dim light of the gas lamps beside the mirror. Freezing rain pelts against the window, but Draco feels comforted by it, held by the house despite what tries so hard to get in. The candles around the massive claw-foot tub are lit, flickering on Harry’s pupils.

Draco gently wipes the blood from his face, his lips, down his neck. He pulls Harry’s shirt off gently, heals his sprained shoulder with spellwork he had to learn while still living with his aunt. Neither of them speak, but Draco’s stomach is bumped by Harry’s knees, which aren’t nearly as knobby as they were when he wasn’t fed. Draco is washing his face once more when Harry puts his thumb on his bottom lip, pulls down a little. Draco wants to cry for his tenderness.

“Thank you,” he says, and Draco sees his eyes brim a little. He gently lifts Harry’s hair and twists it into a bun atop his head.

And Harry is the one to lead him to the bedroom.

“Lie down,” he says. His voice is sure, like he has been waiting just as long as Draco has. Draco’s heart grows and his knees hit the mattress of Harry’s twin bed, Harry’s hands on his back pressing him down gently. 

“Harry.” Draco speaks his name, voice cracking on the second syllable, into the pillow. The smell of Harry’s hair chokes him, male and deep and good. He found one of Harry’s long curls on the shoulder of his coat the other day. Harry’s fingers dig into his hips. “Hurry.”

And then Harry’s fingers are pulling down his trousers and his pants and he’s biting the dimples above Draco’s arse and Draco sobs, involuntarily, but he isn’t ashamed or surprised by himself. He just _needs_ , and Harry in the dim room is willing to give. Draco will receive all of it.

“You are…” Harry starts. Comes back up to kiss Draco at the back of his neck, to whisper in his ear. “Everything I’ve ever wanted.”

Draco moans, half from the pain of hearing him say it and half from his cock hardening against the sheets. He wants Harry so much, and it means it all to have him.

-

Harry pulls Draco onto his lap in the morning at breakfast, at the daily tactical meeting, at lunchtime when everyone drags themselves into the kitchen to see what’s around to eat, at afternoon tea in the parlor. He seems much too delighted to have Draco’s leg over his thigh at dinner. Harry likes to keep Draco’s ass between his strong thighs, likes to have his lips just brushing Draco’s cheeks at all times. It would annoy Draco were he not so similarly desperate to have Harry near him in every capacity for every moment they are available to each other. Harry tries to hold his hand through every meal, as if by letting go Draco will get up and fly out the window. Harry tells him that he loves him with everyone around. Draco wonders if they are better or worse than Granger and Weasley. Harry says, _get in my leather jacket, baby_ , and twirls him around in a circle in the living room just two days after their first kiss, and first fuck, when Molly is playing Celestina. Draco flushes, because he means _Sirius’_ leather jacket, and how romantic must Harry be to want him inside of something so precious. How in love. He sees it in his eyes when Harry laughs at him dancing.

He knows that this is why one evening he and Harry go to bed and find their twin beds shifted into one king-size, soft, curtained heaven. Draco laughs at Harry’s complete bewilderment. 

“She knows we love her,” he says. Harry’s thick brows quirk in confusion. “The house.”

Harry digs his thick fingers into Draco’s bicep. Draco swoons against him, shameless. It’s easy to forgo shame in wartime. He is in love with Harry Potter. He kisses Harry on the cheek.

“I like that you know about this stuff,” Harry says. Draco breathes an assent through his nose. “It’s nice. I like when you teach me.”

Draco laughs a little. Harry is always so bare and honest. His stubble scratches Draco’s neck. 

“I’m so in love with you. Draco.” Potter looks back up at him. His eyes sparkle in the dark. He huffs out a hot laugh onto Draco’s cheeks. It’s embarrassing, almost. The raw honesty that the both of them have accepted in their new reality. Draco wants to live in it forever.

“I’m in love with you, Potter.” To couch it with a “too” sounds like a joke, at this point. “I love you.”

“Harry,” he whispers. He’s right.

“Harry. I love you.” Harry huffs a note of something right in Draco’s face.

With so many dead and dying, his old pit of gnarled fear inside of his stomach untangles into something that cushions embarrassment he would have felt not too long ago at saying so.

They spend more time in the back garden with the sky black-orange from the city lights all around them. It’s strange to hear the sounds of cars going by knowing that they cannot be seen. Draco has gotten used to the near constant wail of sirens, and the stink of the sewer in the summer. But he likes winter best, even despite the darkness always creeping at the edges of his vision. So much agony to be found in such a populated place; dementors have a field day in the skies above London. There’s been record snowfall, Granger won’t stop saying.

The wicker chairs Neville had repaired years ago have little knit cushions on them, courtesy of Molly, and Draco curls up in his designated one to Harry’s left and they smoke until they are much too tired to sit upright anymore. Harry reaches over and strokes his cheek, runs his fingers over the closely shaved sides of his head and tugs playfully on the longer hair atop it.

“We could die tomorrow,” Harry tells him on Christmas Eve. Draco knows this, and he tangles their cold fingers together. The warming charms are fading, and Draco wants to lead him to bed. He nods instead, leans back to look up at the sky. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same sky as in Wiltshire, because here there are no stars and there is just that orange glow that reminds him of Harry, and silence, and soft noises of the dead garden, and the sirens in the distance.


End file.
